Under siege, the 'biased’ BBC fights for its life

The corporation is under fire for over-generous salaries and its soft-Left
sympathies

Neil Midgley, graphic by Tom Shiel

6:40AM GMT 05 Dec 2014

There’s nothing new about the Sun taking aim at the BBC. This week, it has run three full pages of reports criticising BBC executive salaries, cronyism, financial waste and Left-wing bias, backed up by two forthright leader columns. These issues have been frequently (and rightly) probed by newspapers, including this one, for years now.

One of the Sun’s headlines earlier this week – with the initials B B C spelt out vertically to create the headline “Beeb Boys’ Club” – repeated the same visual idea as its front page when George Entwistle resigned as director-general in November 2012. (Except in that case, the initials rather cruelly spelt out “Bye Bye Chump”.) Today, a possible headline for any newspaper would be “Beeb Battles Conservatives”, as George Osborne and No 10 rail against the BBC for its “hyperbolic” coverage of George Osborne’s Autumn Statement. Indeed, the issue of bias – also identified by the Sun this week – is unlikely to die down any time soon.

With the rise of Ukip, the potential snubbing of the Greens in next year’s election debates, a devolution debate that changes daily both north and south of the border, and a vocal Tory Right, the BBC is – as one programme-maker said to me yesterday – “under assault from all sides”. But unlike previous BBC regimes, the new one under Tony Hall seems much readier to come out fighting when it feels it has been wronged.

Indeed, the surprise this week has not been the Sun’s criticisms of the BBC, or even George Osborne’s, but the BBC’s response. On its press office website, the corporation has created graphics of each of the Sun’s editorials – together with point-by-point rebuttals of the paper’s allegations. Over a decade writing about the BBC, this is the first time that I can remember it responding so combatively – not to mention publicly – to a non-libellous newspaper piece.

The BBC’s new public attitude reflects a new team inside. The Jimmy Savile scandal in 2012 claimed the scalp of Entwistle. His communications chief, Paul Mylrea, announced his departure early in 2013. Two years on and Entwistle’s successor, Lord Hall, is preparing for another long and bloody fight. He needs to persuade the next Government not only to renew the BBC’s Royal Charter, which expires at the end of 2016, but to renew the much-criticised TV licence fee, too.

That battle will involve persistent arguments about whether the TV licence fee is technologically out of date, whether it penalises low-income households (including many Sun readers) and whether non-payment should be decriminalised. So Lord Hall has tooled up with a new head of communications, John Shield, and a new head of press, Jonathan Reed.

Shield is a likeable and thoughtful chap, with a strategic mind and a flinty resolve born of years in government communications. (Both he and Reed were recruited from the Department for Work and Pensions. Before that, Shield trained at No 10 at the knee of Alastair Campbell, and has also worked for the Tories.) This week’s events show the birth of a punchy new communications strategy, which was echoed yesterday by the BBC’s director of television, Danny Cohen, who, via Twitter, took on the Daily Mirror over its negative story about repeats at Christmas.

Shield’s new strategy will only succeed, though, if he can land a knockout blow on a hot-button issue – which neither he nor the Sun has managed this week.

The Sun’s first gripe was executive pay, saying (and the BBC hasn’t denied it) that the BBC still has 91 managers who are paid more than the Prime Minister’s salary of £142,500 – and 11 who earn more than twice that. The BBC responds that it has cut the number of senior managers, and their pay bill, by more than a third since 2009. What it doesn’t point out is that last year the number of middle managers, in the next tier down, increased from 638 to 729 – at an average salary of £77,308.

The fact is that Hall is not perceived, either inside or outside the BBC, to have solved the “officer class” problem that he himself identified. In the news division, it seems that the Hall-appointed chief James Harding can find money to hire any number of new senior colleagues, some of them without an open recruitment process. Harding’s old News International colleague, Keith Blackmore, as well as Jonathan Munro and Jim Gray from ITN, all appeared in the BBC newsroom shortly before Harding announced that he was going to make 415 news jobs redundant.

Regardless of her journalistic chops, ITN’s star reporter Lucy Manning is also not a popular hire among her new colleagues at the BBC, simply because they fear for their own jobs – and wonder where Manning’s salary has come from. (Though Harding has, cannily, not only preferred outsiders: Huw Edwards, recently promoted to main election night anchor, has also been given a new deal to present the BBC One News at Ten until 2020.)

Those staffing issues would pale, though, beside a genuine row with No 10 about bias. Perceptions of soft-Left bias are a long-standing Achilles’ heel for the BBC. And they are only likely to increase whenever the Tories are in power, and Conservative ministers are being vigorously held to account on the Today programme.

The BBC has indeed hired journalists from the Guardian (such as Newsnight editor Ian Katz) – but it has also recruited from the other end of Fleet Street, not least James Harding himself, formerly editor of The Times. The BBC’s critics, including those at Westminster, need to back up their accusations of bias with cold, hard formal complaints about individual programmes. Even so, Hall and his senior team certainly need to do more to shake off their soft-Left image.

What every politician eventually comes to realise, however, is that there are no votes in bashing the BBC. Broadly speaking, the British love it. And £2.80 per week per household is good value. The BBC will go on after 2016, and some kind of universal funding – even if it’s not called a TV licence – will continue, too.

What the BBC’s figures mask, though, is the Sun’s best argument against BBC management: financial waste. Earlier this year, a new valuation of the BBC’s pension fund showed that its deficit had ballooned from £1.1 billion to £2 billion. Lord Hall’s response was to divert an extra £365 million of licence-fee-payers’ cash, over the next four years, into closing that gap. He didn’t ask BBC staff for a penny. And the BBC Trust, supposed guardians of value for money, didn’t make him.

The BBC’s annual report this year also showed that its headcount had actually gone up in 2013-14. Meanwhile, the corporation had spent £162.9 million on restructuring costs over four years, for a net headcount reduction over that period of just 566 people – which averages out to £287,000 in restructuring costs for every net job lost.

Lord Hall also says that the BBC’s in-house TV production should have to compete against independent producers. But, conveniently, that cost-lowering promise doesn’t extend to existing BBC productions such as Top Gear, Strictly Come Dancing or EastEnders.

No BBC rebuttal could explain all of this profligacy – and that fudge in the BBC’s finances is where the corporation’s critics should focus their fire.